Tis not too late (to seek a newer world)
by et.in.arkadia
Summary: Enjolras is Grantaire's cause. That night, he feels himself a ragged banner.


There's a moment, before the world ends.

They're going to die, and Enjolras is far past caring. He passed caring a long time ago. Dead men don't have the same worries as the living. Outside, faintly, their compatriots are singing.

Inside the cafe Musain there's only Enjolras and Grantaire in the hallway. All they have left is a hallway and their bodies in it. Enjolras hitches him up to the wall, while soldiers gather in the streets surrounding. He can feel them on the march, sure as he feels Grantaire.

"We are going to die," he tells the proud neck under his teeth.

"True," agrees Grantaire, agreeable for once, bending like a bow beneath him. Cocked like a rifle. "Just so." He has been drinking, as usual, and in preparation, eyes bright with courage bolstered by spirits.

Grantaire's black hair like an ink spill, wild across his brow. His big eyes, his red lips. Outside, they are piling broken wood high at Enjolras' command. Inside, Grantaire is his to command.

Enjolras says, "Grantaire," and he tastes both name and skin. "We have some time yet."

But they both know it isn't true. The ragtag crew of brave, brilliantly foolish students are raking the barricades together and playing at revolution. They should be buried in books, not shouldering iron, Enjolras knows too late. The muskets must be getting heavy by now. The people haven't come. Not yet. When they do it will be too late for them.

Grantaire says it aloud. He says, "You know that is not true. We are already on borrowed time. Some plotting General gives us these hours."

They look at each other as though across a space of smoke and fire. It is only the inches between their mouths.

Enjolras is holding him fast. It is not far to embrace him. "I would know you," he hears himself say. It is not so difficult to say, with the world ending.

"Would you?" says Grantaire, one dark eyebrow up. Only that. Then he tilts to press his lips against Enjolras'. His lips are dry. "Come, then."

There is no one else around. Their lively cafe lies moldering already. Their deputies are by the pile of trash that is their defense. Enjolras is led upstairs by the hand.

They go into a room. It has been stripped, no furnishings save the mattress on the floor, too unwieldy to haul out the window. Everything else is gone.

Grantaire closes the door behind them. He moves to the window, pulling tattered curtains that have remained as a long-ago symbol to modesty. Now they are sealed in, immodest.

Enjolras paces towards Grantaire once they're alone. The curtains are down. They don't have to see the barricade going up.

"We only have a moment," he tells Grantaire, Grantaire's graceful throat, the dip of his shoulder. "They will miss us both."

Enjolras will be missed, and Grantaire will miss him.

"Let them," says Grantaire, philosophical, challenging, as ever. "Let it be, Enjolras."

After that he lets himself push Grantaire over to the bed. The world is ending anyway.

And why had he never let himself do so before? So many nights spent arguing with Grantaire beside him, sharing wine and words until sunrise. Grantaire, a wasted vintage.

Grantaire, cynical and sensitive and antagonistic and lovely, Grantaire with his sharp tongue and the bottles he dulled it with. Grantaire, who did not believe that they could change anything in the world, but believed in Enjolras enough to help him try, to die.

Grantaire will die for him. Because of him. Enjolras knows that lives will be lost before the end of this, given up because of the ideas he helped spread; he is helping to kill them too, he knows. But they will be martyred. They will be remembered. They die for something greater.

Grantaire will die for him. Grantaire would not be here but for him. Grantaire would never have climbed atop a barricade, but he will scramble up one soon, to stand next to Enjolras. Enjolras is Grantaire's cause. That night, he feels himself a ragged banner.

He does not know if this is the better or worse decision. He no longer cares. It feels good, so they go on. Is it better or worse to know what this is like? To know what they might have been in another time and place?

Enjolras does not believe in heaven or in hell. Those are empty promises made by the elite to keep the people asleep and dreaming of a better place awaiting them. Enjolras knows there is nothing waiting. What is to be had must be taken.

He takes Grantaire. Grantaire takes him. It is an old story, older than the other that they will enact in the name of freedom. They couple the way the priests warn about and the poets praise.

As he revels in Grantaire, he understands why the priests are worried. He wishes himself a poet. If he had Prouvaire's silver tongue, he could tell Grantaire what it feels like to move in him at last. He had not expected such unbridled desire, such unfettered joy. Such emotions had never come easily to Enjolras. But in the end it is the most natural thing in the world to lose himself in Grantaire, to forget, for the space of minutes, that he is anything else than alive.

Underneath him, Grantaire's mouth is open, red and wet. At first a grimace of pain had seized along his cheek, but he said nothing, and it is gone now.

His mouth is open, and his eyes are, his wide eyes on Enjolras' face, his long, lithe body open too. His legs hook around him, keep Enjolras close. He reaches a hand that trembles from wine and sex and mortality and steadies it in Enjolras' honey-colored hair. He moans, and moves with him. Outside the window there is the busy whine of saws on wood, and smoke is scenting the air with charcoal.

Then Grantaire seems to remember who he is, what they are, and he starts to say filthy things, takes up a running commentary while Enjolras fucks him. They're at the end of the world, why shouldn't they argue about it?

Enjolras laughs against his lips and drives them faster, bated. Grantaire knows just how to spark him. It had always been Grantaire. It is always Grantaire.

Grantaire, beside him in the night. Grantaire who would stand beside him.

Grantaire takes all of him in so deep. Grantaire welcomes him, wants him. That was never a secret. The secret was that Enjolras wanted, too. He told himself such earthly pursuits weren't of consequence once his path was clear. He told himself that. Easier not to involve another, as poor Marius was discovering with his Cosette. Easier to declare himself for Patria alone.

Only Grantaire, of consequence, wouldn't go, no matter how often Enjolras challenged him to do so.

He'd thought that challenging Grantaire might make him go; Grantaire took him up on challenges the way he'd never follow an order or a plea. But Grantaire wouldn't leave no matter what Enjolras said. He would stay, he said.

"Stay," says Grantaire beneath him. His hand slides around to the back of his neck, holding him in place. Enjolras is too close now, entirely too close to the end, and had made to pull out to end them together; but Grantaire shakes his head. His black hair spills across the mattress, his red lip is bitten. "Be in me, Enjolras." His face breaks into a wicked smile. The sun coming up after too long of a night at the cafe Musain. "I dare you."

Enjolras reaches for him then, takes Grantaire, straining, in his fist. He appreciates challenges, too. His fingers are calloused and sure and strong. He thrusts hard, making Grantaire groan. Grantaire does nothing but groan for a long while after that, deprived of proper words. They are slick with sweat, and their eyes are round. All throughout it they haven't glanced away. They watch each other closely. The way they often did.

Grantaire does not muffle his shout of pleasure as he spills over their bellies. It's hot and wet and messy now. Instead of slowing down Enjolras speeds his hips, sees the way his motion spreads across Grantaire's face. It seems a shame to have to leave him. It will hurt, he thinks, to pull apart.

He thinks that as nature seizes in him and he spends himself in Grantaire, panting, held fast. His forehead is down on Grantaire's, and he gives him over his name, over and over.

What are words, what is a name, at the end of the world?

Afterward, they lie sideways on the mattress. Enjolras touches the back of his neck. "I wish you would go. I would have you live."

"That is why I must stay, and die," argues Grantaire, sleepily.

Enjolras swallows. "If it matters," he says, since nothing does, "I have wanted to do that for a very long time."

"It matters." Grantaire, the cynic, sounds strange, delighted. "Since when? Does Patria know?"

"Since the first time you opened your unfortunate mouth, and every time thereafter," says Enjolras, shoving at his shoulder. Grantaire turns around, reverses direction on the bed, kisses him fiercely. Kisses can be fierce, and this one is.

Later they pull away, hesitant, kiss-stung. Enjolras touches Grantaire's swollen mouth, for once silenced.

Then it isn't. "I did not think that I could be made to see anything as wholly good, but I was wrong," says Grantaire, who never said that he was wrong. "I have spent my life looking at ugliness, when there is so much beauty." He palms Enjolras' cheek, the fine sharp bones under soft skin.

Enjolras' heart is beating very fast. "We strive for such a world."

"I know," says Grantaire. "It is good to experience it a while, that I might understand what we are fighting for." His hand is warm, his long painter's fingers smoothing along Enjolras' neck, the wave of his hair, his flushed cheek.

Enjolras puts his hand up next to Grantaire's. "You should not die for me," he says, before there is not another chance to say it.

Grantaire studies him with his cool skeptic's eye. "Not for," he says. _With,_ his eyes say. "Where shall we go next?" he says instead.

"We will be missed at the barricade," says Enjolras, almost regretful, at the same time that Marius sings out, "_Enjolras!_" right on cue, and with perfect pitch.

"You, at the least," says Grantaire, but then Marius scales: "_Grantaire!_ My friends-"

"We are called," says Enjolras, reaching for the remains of his shirt. They pull apart, and it hurts.

When they are dressed and ready, Enjolras doesn't say how glad he is, how bolstered his own spirits, but he thinks his face might say it. "You are prepared?" he asks.

And Grantaire nods. Grantaire crowds him into the doorway one more time. Grantaire breathes him in, before he draws back, and draws himself up. "Now I am," he says.

They go downstairs together.

Later they will be back in an upstairs.

Grantaire will look at Enjolras across a room full of the living and the dead, and smile, moving to join him. He will smile as he reaches for Enjolras' offered hand, at the end.


End file.
